endorses this aspiration?  This desire of Tom’s is the basis on which the greatness of England is largely built, and it will not take us long to discover that Bushido does not stand on a lesser pedestal.  If fighting in itself, be it offensive or defensive, is, as Quakers rightly testify, brutal and wrong, we can still say with Lessing, “We know from what failings our virtue springs."[3] “Sneaks” and “cowards” are epithets of the worst opprobrium to healthy, simple natures.  Childhood begins life with these notions, and knighthood also; but, as life grows larger and its relations many-sided, the early faith seeks sanction from higher authority and more rational sources for its own justification, satisfaction and development.  If military interests had operated alone, without higher moral support, how far short of chivalry would the ideal of knighthood have fallen!  In Europe, Christianity, interpreted with concessions convenient to chivalry, infused it nevertheless with spiritual data.  “Religion, war and glory were the three souls of a perfect Christian knight,” says Lamartine.  In Japan there were several

SOURCES OF BUSHIDO,

of which I may begin with Buddhism.  It furnished a sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with death.  A foremost teacher of swordsmanship, when he saw his pupil master the utmost of his art, told him, “Beyond this my instruction must give way to Zen teaching.”  “Zen” is the Japanese equivalent for the Dhyana, which “represents human effort to reach through meditation zones of thought beyond the range of verbal expression."[4] Its method is contemplation, and its purport, as far as I understand it, to be convinced of a principle that underlies all phenomena, and, if it can, of the Absolute itself, and thus to put oneself in harmony with this Absolute.  Thus defined, the teaching was more than the dogma of a sect, and whoever attains to the perception of the Absolute raises himself above mundane things and awakes, “to a new Heaven and a new Earth.”

[Footnote 3:  Ruskin was one of the most gentle-hearted and peace loving men that ever lived.  Yet he believed in war with all the fervor of a worshiper of the strenuous life.  “When I tell you,” he says in the Crown of Wild Olive, “that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men.  It is very strange to me to discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. * * * I found in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they were nourished in war and wasted by peace, taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace.”]

[Footnote 4:  Lafcadio Hearn, Exotics and Retrospectives, p. 84.]